The Shattered Seam (Seam Stalkers Book 1)

by Kathleen Groger

  Schizophrenia ran in families.

  Nana had seen and heard things no one else did. Ever since she’d confided in me, my experiences made sense. The disease was gunning for me. I had funky feelings and weird visions. Things I didn’t tell anyone about. Not anymore.

  “Guys, come check out this fountain,” Daniel yelled.

  I turned away, brushed the dirt off my jeans, and righted my suitcase. It took several more deep breaths before my heartbeat returned to normal and the pain left my head. Of all the guys to see me sprawled on my butt and acting loony, it had to be Daniel. Jeez. At least Eric hadn’t filmed my stupidity.

  “Dudes, this fountain will make a great visual.” Randall came up behind Daniel, piled his cases on the cobblestone, and filmed the statue from every angle. “It’d be better if it worked. Definitely have to get it in the early morning, with fog swirling around the base.”

  I couldn’t look at the fountain. I’d hallucinated. Again. But there was no way I was telling anyone. I refused to go back to the hospital.

  Eric walked up, his face half-hidden behind the boxes in his arms. “Who has the key? I’m gonna have to take a piss in a few.”

  Daniel held up a skeleton key.

  I grabbed the handle of my bag and waited for Daniel to unlock the ancient door. The wooden monstrosity had to stand twelve feet tall. Carvings of crisscrossed swords and a worn, scratched-out design of some animal—the four legs the only part intact—covered the wood.

  Daniel touched the image. “Rand, make sure you get a shot of this.”

  He pushed the door open with both hands. The deep creaking of unoiled hinges echoed in the empty entrance as if announcing our arrival. Chills slipped over the entire length of my body. The door swung into absolute darkness, shooting a shiver across the hairs on the back of my neck.

  Randall flicked a switch. “And we have power.”

  A chandelier, the size of a monster truck tire, hung from a wood beam and dripped with hundreds of crystals and twice as many cobwebs.

  I wrinkled my nose at the closed-up, stagnant smell.

  We stepped into the three-story entry, complete with a wooden staircase winding up both sides of the foyer to landings on the second and third floors. These stairs put the ones I had seen at the Titanic exhibit to shame. A half-circle balcony overlooked the room from the second floor. Faded red-and-black banners of lions standing on their back legs hung from each side and flapped in the breeze that had to be from opening the door. A bronze-colored starburst inlaid in the middle of the white marble floor brought to mind a design I couldn’t quite place. It was an entrance built for a king.

  Daniel whistled. “Bet this place cost millions.” He walked into the room to the right, and the rest of us followed.

  “This will work for the command center.” Eric put his boxes on the floor. “Well, Sam, how does it feel to be on the set of Horrors & Hauntings?”

  I leaned against the wall and took in the vast room filled with white-draped furniture and inch-thick dust. The vision of blood still filled my mind. “Very glamorous. When do you start filming?”

  “From now on, assume the cameras are always shooting. Try to stay out of the way if you don’t want to be in the show.” Eric clicked on his camcorder and panned the room. “But no worries if you don’t. You can be edited out. Or we can leave you in. I’m telling you, the fans would love you.”

  I gave him a noncommittal head tilt.

  Daniel pulled out a monitor from the closest box. “We already edit out all of Eric’s swearing.”

  “Eff off. Let’s get the rest of the cameras going.” Eric shoved the camcorder in his cargo pants pocket and helped Daniel open the cases, removing jumbo camera after jumbo camera while Randall filmed them working.

  Stay out of the way of the cameras? No problem.

  “Hey, man, where are the walkie-talkies?” Randall spun in a circle, like they would suddenly materialize.

  “You didn’t pack them? Well, that blows.” Eric rolled his neck. “Guess we can use our phones.”

  “Maybe.” I took out my phone and glanced at the lack of bars. “There’s no service in this room. I’m going to see if I can get a signal.”

  Eric waved. “We’re going to get the rest of the equipment. Are you okay by yourself?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  I left what I figured had been the parlor back in the castle’s glory days and went through the smaller arched doorway on the other side of the room. I didn’t want to be alone, but I had to check in with my parents and change my jeans. Wet, dirty jeans had a way of making me cranky.

  Maybe I wasn’t losing my mind. Maybe the blood had been rusty water. Maybe I’d overreacted because of the birds. The more I rationalized the vision, the easier it was to believe. It was a little harder to ignore the voice in my head shouting “Liar.”

  Wandering down a wide, stone hallway, I passed mural after mural depicting a garden maze painted on the rough walls. I was about to label my search for a bathroom an epic failure when I spotted a door about half the width of a standard door.

  It opened without a sound. The good news: the teeny space was a bathroom. The bad: it didn’t have a working light.

  Technology to the rescue. I tapped the flashlight app on my phone, which lit the room with a faint glow. Dark wallpaper accented with gold swirls covered the walls and clashed with the gold, tiled floor.

  I closed the door, set the phone down, and emptied my pockets. Money, gum, lip balm, and Amelia’s paper all went on the edge of the sink. I debated tossing the sketch, but I couldn’t. The innocence of her face would haunt me. I put the backpack on the toilet, pulled out dry stuff, and changed as fast as possible.

  Dry and fully clothed, I refilled my pockets, leaned over the blue sink, and checked out my reflection in the gilded mirror. My hair stuck out at odd angles. Great. I turned on the faucet, and thankfully, it worked. And double bonus, there wasn’t any blood. I splashed water on my face, smoothed my hair down, then pulled it back into a ponytail.

  The temperature dropped to the point where my breath fogged half the mirror. It was getting colder, and the insulation sucked. I wiped the fog away.

  The mirror fogged again.

  This time, the fog turned into ice crystals and formed weird shapes. The crystals spread. In a clear section, I spotted a tall shadow behind me.

  My heart punched, punched, punched against my ribcage. The shadow came closer. My heart threatened to explode, but I clamped my lips together, forced myself not to scream.

  4

  I whirled. There wasn’t a damn thing there. No shadows, no darkness, nothing. Even the mirror was clear.

  I dropped onto the closed toilet seat and hugged my knees. Twisted Nana’s bracelet around and around and around my wrist. Anger and anxiety burned my eyes. A tear rolled down my face. Then another and another. I’d never had two hallucinations in the same day.

  A chill pierced my fingertips and raced through me until it reached my toes. I pulled my arms tighter and cursed the cold. I’d imagined blood and shadows. Thanks to the stupid castle, my already haywired brain was fritzing and sparking with insanity.

  Would Eric leave if I asked? Part of me thought he would, but I couldn’t do that to him. They’d tried forever to get access here. If I ruined it for him and the show, I would hate myself and they would hate me. I just needed to suck it up. Keep my suffering silent, like I had in the past.

  I sniffed, wiped my cheeks, and stood. I was stronger than this. I could—would—keep it together. No more nuttiness. A few deep breaths later, I grabbed my bag and sprinted from the bathroom. And smacked into something solid.

  “What the—” Eric clutched my arm and kept me from falling.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why are you running? You okay?” He gave me an odd look, like he knew I was freaking out.

  “I’m fine.” I rubbed under my eyes. “I didn’t want to miss anything.”

  “You haven’t. Did you find the bathroo
m?”

  “Yeah, down there on the left.”

  “Good. We’re going to check out the castle in a few. Meet me back at the command center.” He tore down the long corridor without waiting for me to answer.

  I really liked Eric, despite his obsession with documenting evidence from the other side. Everyone at school thought he was cool, but his coolness never extended to their thoughts of me. And if Mom had told him my secret, what did he think about it? Was he going to be hovering over me, waiting for a breakdown? No, Mom wouldn’t have said anything. She was too embarrassed I was so much like the mother she had ignored.

  Screw it. I wasn’t going to fall apart. It was over. Done. I refused to accept more hallucinations. My jacked-up brain had imagined all it was going to this week. Normal. I would be normal. Had to be normal.

  Feeling better after my pep-talk, I returned to the command center and stopped outside the doorway.

  “Man, she shouldn’t be here. It’s not going to help. She’ll only mess things up.” Randall sounded pissed-off.

  “Eric insisted. It should be okay. She should boost ratings.” Daniel seemed more worried than angry.

  “Dude, we don’t need—”

  I backed up until I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear my pounding heart. They didn’t want me. Perfect. No one, not even me, wanted me here but Eric. And he might only want me for his ratings. This trip was such a bad idea. I should have insisted on staying anywhere else. I could’ve spent the week with my neighbor, Mrs. Donaldson, in her stinky cat-piss house. Cat piss was better than crazy piss.

  When I went back, I made sure my footsteps were loud enough for them to hear. They were silent. Randall tinkered with his camera and didn’t look up.

  “We’ll do a quick tour, figure out where we want to place the static night-vision cameras, then get set before our guests arrive.” Daniel glanced out a window. “That is, if we paid Frank enough to come back.”

  “Guests?” I said a quick prayer for them to be my age, though I knew the odds were as good as my parents winning the lottery. But maybe more people would help deflect everyone’s uneasiness about my presence.

  “Since this is such a big investigation, and we need a ratings boost—”

  “Oh, man. I almost shit myself.” Eric’s voice echoed around the room. “I was taking a leak when this dark curtain flapped and brushed my arm. There’s a busted window in there. Almost froze my balls off.”

  I was a total doofus. I’d been so ready to blame myself for anything strange, and in this case, it was the wind and a curtain. I couldn’t believe I’d missed a broken window, unless he’d found a different bathroom.

  Daniel shook his head. “Like I was saying before Eric gave us the details of his urinary adventures, we’re bringing a medium in to see if she can get any readings.”

  Despite my skepticism that ghosts were real, I’d watched every episode of all four seasons of Horrors & Hauntings, even had a lot of them on my phone, and they’d never brought in a medium. When that other once-popular ghost hunting show started relying on gimmicks, they ended up faking evidence and got dropped by their network.

  “Who’s the medium?” Maybe that was who Randall didn’t want here.

  “Marisol Deville. She’s from New Orleans.” Daniel pronounced it N’awlins. “She has the highest ratings of all mediums. She should add some drama to this episode.”

  If they were bringing in a medium, I was almost afraid to ask who the other guest was. Maybe a priest to do an exorcism. “Who else is coming?”

  “Brett Baxter will help guest host,” Eric said.

  I scrunched my nose. “Who’s that?”

  Randall showed me a picture on his phone of a guy old enough to be my father. “You know.” He did a goofy butt-shaking dance as he wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “The mooo-vie star.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He was the lead in the Hammerhead movies.” Eric gave me an open-palmed, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “Come on, tell me you’ve seen them. They’re classic.”

  I laughed, but it came out more of a snort. “You’re having the dude who played Hammerhead, the serial killing fix-it man, come on your investigation? Your ratings must be tanking.” My words silenced them. I was an idiot. “I didn’t mean—”

  Eric squinted and looked like he wanted to punch something. Probably me. “Not the guy who played the killer. The cop.” The sharpness in his voice cut across my skin.

  “He’s a cheeseball. Why’d you invite him?”

  “He’s an amateur ghost investigator and has a new movie coming out. It’s good for everybody’s career. Keeps things fresh too.” Eric’s voice went back to his normal easygoing style. I’d never known him to stay mad for any length of time.

  “Funtime Frank is scheduled to drop them off in an hour. Let’s get going. Sam, we’re going to film the tour, so watch what you say.”

  I saluted. “Got it.”

  Eric snapped his fingers and pointed to me. “I almost forgot. Will you sketch us a map of the castle and grounds?”

  “I can do that. Do you want each floor on a separate sheet of paper?” I pulled out my sketchbook. I wanted to kiss Eric for asking me to do something that would quiet my mind and keep me from worrying about the guys not wanting me. Or worse, hallucinating again.

  “That would be awesome. Also, can you mark where we place the stationary cameras?”

  I nodded and did a quick sketch of the command center’s layout. I even added the broken clock hanging on the wall. Everyone else took a camera. Eric and Daniel moved to the entry while Randall filmed them filming. I trudged along behind them, adding to my blueprint.

  Eric went into TV mode. “Once home to a Revolutionary War prison camp, this island was nicknamed Camp Defiance when the men held here refused bread or water. Stephen Novak, heir to the NNR Railroad fortune, kept the name. Defiance Castle was completed in 1904 at the time the wealthy were building their summer castles here in the Thousand Islands of New York and Canada. There are two other big castles in the area, and both are open for public tours. Defiance remains a private residence. A very haunted residence.” He stared, unblinking, at the camera until Randall clicked it off.

  We went under the main stairs, down the hallway, turned right, and soon reached two massive archways supported by spiraled columns. Randall bowed low at the waist and made a sweeping arm gesture. “Dudes, my lady, may I present what I believe is the grand hall.” He held his camera with one hand, and with the other, escorted me through the marble entrance.

  I forgot, for a few minutes, everything else that had happened: the bathroom, the blood, the birds. The beauty of the room wiped it all away.

  My breath stuck in my throat. It was as if I had stepped into one of those Disney fairy tale movies. The hall’s towering walls climbed two stories. The floors were white marble, the walls a pale blue with a swirl of gold winking in the light. I could imagine people paying tons of money to have their wedding reception here. Or prom. I pictured Daniel in a tux, holding me close for a slow song. That was one fantasy that would never come true.

  Randall pretended to kiss the back of my hand, released me, and bowed again. He then turned serious and aimed his huge camera at Eric, who weaved through the dozens of round tables draped with dust-covered white cloths. Sunlight streaked through the arched windows spaced about a foot apart from one another along the walls on both sides. The room could have doubled as a king’s throne room.

  Eric looked over his shoulder. “Daniel, can you do an EMF reading?”

  “On it.” Daniel pulled out a slim black device about the size of my phone.

  Eric faced the camera. “EMF stands for electromagnetic field. Anything that carries energy has an EMF. It’s believed spirits radiate EMF. When we determine what is already present in the room, we’ll have a baseline for changes, signaling the possible presence of a spirit.”

  I grew bored with all the tech talk. It was going to be a long week. Eric con
tinued his monologue at the other end of the hall, but I tuned him out.

  Careful to stay out of Randall’s camera range, I sketched the vast space, wishing I could add color to show the carved gold-and-blue squares covering the ceiling like in an old railroad terminal. I added the catwalk, complete with wired railing, running around the top of the entire length of the hall. I spotted another broken clock on the wall above the catwalk.

  It had stopped at 2:13.

  Just like the one in the command center.

  5

  More than one clock stopped at 2:13. What had happened to zap them, or had they coincidentally stopped at the exact same time?

  Eric’s voice penetrated my thoughts. “The owner claims this room’s ripe with activity. We’ll set up two cameras in here to capture any apparitions.”

  Daniel marked the two camera spots with tape, and I put matching X’s on my map. We left the grand hall, and Daniel walked next to me. I tried not to notice how close he was, but there was no way I couldn’t. Knowing Daniel thought of me as a little sister didn’t stop me from thinking of him as uber hot.

  “How long has it been since anyone’s lived here?” I worked to keep my voice casual.

  “I’m not sure exactly, but it’s been a while.”

  “Why hasn’t this place been vandalized if it’s empty all the time?” I hoped my tone was low enough in case a camera was still rolling.

  “I’d guess it’s because people are too scared to come here. Well, and the curse.” Daniel gave me a lopsided smile that brought heat to my cheeks.

  “Curse? What curse?”

  Eric turned and walked backward in front of us. “Legend states that Stephen Novak cursed the island and castle before he died.”

  “Dum de dum dum.” Randall hummed the last dum right in my ear.

  “The rumor goes, if anything was ever removed from here, the thief would suffer a fate worse than death.” Daniel held out his hands, palms up. “Not sure if anyone’s tested it or not.”

  “That explains why the locals didn’t want to bring us out here. But come on, Novak wasn’t some Egyptian pharaoh or anything.”